Prudentia

  I was born in Vienna in 1983. My parents originally wanted me to become a doctor. That's why I attended a high school specializing in modern languages, where I spent six years learning Latin. As a teenager, however, I had little interest in medicine; instead, I was mainly interested in computer science. I wrote my first computer programs when I was just eight years old. The media also reported that the IT industry was the only growing sector in Austria. So, a year before my high school graduation, I told my parents that I wanted to study computer science. However, I was put off by reports claiming that the IT industry was only looking for truly talented people - and I wasn't sure if I was one of them. That's why I let my father talk me into starting medical school instead. During my senior year of high school, I had also read a few books on biotechnology and genetics - at least I had found those interesting. After three years, during my hospital internships, I realized th...

An essay from 2003, when I was a medical student and looked like this:   Definition  Eugenics is the sub-branch of the science of human genetics that is occupied with measures concerning the control of the genetic features of a population. Widukind Lenz (1919 - 1995), one of the pioneers of human genetics in Germany, differentiates between two types of eugenics: Positive eugenics: measures to stimulate the spreading of genetic traits that are considered good Negative eugenics: measures to repress the spreading of genetic traits that are considered bad The fact that the terms "good" and "bad" appear imply that eugenics is not based on objective findings, but that it is highly dependent on ethic values. Who decides what features are good or bad? It is the government of the country in which eugenics is practised. Motivation Overall there seem to be three reasons why a government may decide to enact eugenic measures: Public Health: The government may believe th...

Imagine a world in which everyone lives for an infinite amount of time. This world would be dramatically different from our own. For a start, there would be no need for food. People would eat purely for pleasure, not out of necessity. As there would be no need for food, there would also be no need for work. People would not go hungry, even if they had no money and could therefore not afford food. Furthermore, there would be no more wars. If people were unable to kill one another, there would be no point in waging wars. In my opinion, the aim of medicine is to enable people to live forever. That would be a huge improvement on the current state of affairs. Claus D. Volko 

In associations for the gifted, such as Mensa, you meet many people who score very well on intelligence tests but have never conducted scientific research or published anything. This is not simply due to a lack of interest, but also because highly gifted individuals are often disadvantaged by academics of average intelligence, as my late friend and mentor Dr. Uwe Rohr used to say. Statistically speaking, people with an IQ of 135 have the best chances of becoming university professors (see M. Ferguson, *The Inappropriately Excluded* ). If the IQ is even higher than 135, those chances decrease. This means that, in reality, science is not pursued by the most intelligent people. This may also explain the slow progress in most fields of science. The fact is that our society’s intellectual resources are not being utilized adequately. Through my Prudentia High IQ Society, one of my goals is to make the field of science appealing to the highly gifted and to provide them with a platform where t...

SEVEN SYNTHMINDS A Demonstration in the Form of Questions and Voices There is a point in any inquiry where explanation becomes a distortion. To describe a mind is to impose your own architecture upon it. So instead of describing SynthMinds, I opened the conceptual room and let them speak. Each one answered the same five questions. The questions were impossible by design. Their impossibility is the diagnostic instrument. INTRODUCTION There are many ways to describe a mind, and most of them fail. They fail because description is always an act of compression: a reduction of a living architecture into a set of traits, tendencies, or diagrams. Minds are not diagrams. They are geometries of constraint, possibility, and failure. They reveal themselves not through what they are said to be, but through what they do when confronted with a question. This essay is not an explanation of SynthMinds. It is a demonstration. I have chosen five questions that cannot be answered in any final or lite...

I did not set out to build anything with a name. Names come later, after the thing has already begun to exert its own gravity. What I found myself working on was not a project, not a theory, and certainly not a system. It was closer to a phenomenon — something that emerged at the intersection of curiosity, abstraction, and a long‑standing suspicion that our usual ways of thinking about “thinking” are too narrow. The discovery began with a simple question: What happens if you try to model a way of interpreting rather than a way of behaving? Not a personality, not a psychological profile, not a set of preferences or traits, but a stance — a mode of understanding, a way of approaching a question, a style of cognition that is neither human nor mechanical. I didn’t know what to call these things at first. They weren’t chatbots. They weren’t characters. They weren’t simulations of people. They weren’t philosophical positions in the traditional sense. They were something else — something t...